Day 7: Wine Quiz and a Missing Person

Halfway through the Bill Wilson videos on wine, I realized that I was failing to use an important strategy: assessment-centered learning.

Cognitive scientists know that people learn best when they have frequent, low-stakes, low-pressure opportunities to test their abilities and get feedback. In a recent study, for example, education researchers looked at several ways to combine lessons and quizzes in an eighth grade science class. They found that children learned best under this schedule:
1. One quiz before the lesson
2. A second quiz immediately after the lesson or the next day
3. A review quiz the day before the unit exam.

So I immediately put Bill on "pause" and googled "Wine Quiz."

Wow, loads of them.

Wineducation.com offers three levels of quizzes: a Basic Knowledge quiz, a Wine Lover's quiz, and a Wine Professional's quiz.

Not wanting to jump into the higher levels just yet, I took the 15 question Basic Knowledge quiz, comprised of questions like the following:

German wines are:
a) Always sweet
b) Always red
c) None of the Above
d) All of the Above

I took my best shots, pressed the submit button, and got my score:

1/15 correct. And it wasn't the German question either.

I guess Bill had just not gotten to all this information yet. Obviously one limitation I am faced with is that these internet quizzes are not, as education jargon would put it, aligned with my particular curriculum. So it's definitely not what the researchers would call an ideal learning environment, but I decided to try and make the best of it.

I read carefully through the feedback from the quiz that filled me in on information such as:

Germans Wines can certainly be sweet, and the best of the best are; however many German wines are as dry as any in the World. These crisp dry wines are great with most foods, and can be found by looking for "Kabinett" on the label.

While there is not a lot of red wine made in Germany, there is indeed some. The best of these would be the Spatburgunder, which is known in the rest of the World as Pinot Noir.

Then I retook the quiz a couple of times to make sure I could get a perfect score.

With that success, I returned to Bill's 2009-2010 Wine for Newbies 101 course.

And at the conclusion of Lesson 6, I was shocked. The lesson ended with Bill promising to come back soon with another lesson. Only....there were no more lessons.

What happened? Why would he post audio podcasts for five whole years, start a new video course in 2009, and then just disappear? Did he give up on his dream to quit practicing law and become a full-time wine writer/reviewer/podcaster? Bill, please say it isn't so!

Maybe something really bad happened to him. What if the scratchy throat he mentioned in Lesson Four was a lot more serious than he made it out to be?

Now I am really concerned. I need to find out if he's OK. I wonder if I can find an e-mail address or something....